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COAP Fund

The Columbia Open-Access Publication (COAP) Fund will underwrite reasonable article-processing fees for open-access journals when funds are not otherwise available. The fund is supported by Columbia University Libraries/Information Services (CUL/IS). CUL/IS has established the COAP Fund in fulfillment of Columbia’s commitment to the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity.

Goals

The goals of the COAP Fund are to support innovative models of scholarly publishing; Increase access to Columbia’s research and scholarship; and aid Columbia faculty, students, and staff who want to publish in open-access journals but who do not have other sources of funding to cover article-processing fees.

Guidelines

Eligible Authors

The COAP Fund is available to any Columbia faculty member, post-doctoral researcher, staff member, or student author. Authors who were at Columbia while the research was conducted may also qualify for reimbursement. The fund is not currently available to Columbia affiliates including Barnard College, Teachers College, or Union Theological Seminary.

Eligible Articles

Eligible Publication Venues

COAP funds may be used to pay article-processing fees in open-access journals (i.e., journals that do not charge readers or their institutions for access to the peer-reviewed articles they publish). Eligible journals must:

Provide unfettered access to all peer-reviewed articles. Journals with a hybrid open-access model or delayed open-access model are not eligible.

No Other Sources of Funding Available

The COAP Fund is a limited resource intended to support open access publishing across the university. We expect researchers to request funding for open access publication from their funding agency if they can do so (the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will all fund open access publication as part of their research grants). If such funds are not available, we welcome your application to the COAP Fund.

Article Reimbursement Cap

The maximun dollar amount that the COAP Fund will reimburse for a single article is $3,000.

Author Reimbursement Cap

Authors may receive funding for up to $3,000 per year for all article-processing charges. Unused amounts do not roll over to future years.

Multiple Authorship

In the case of an article with multiple authors, each eligible author can apply for reimbursement for a prorated portion of the publication fee. An example: An article with three authors, two of whom are from Columbia, is to appear in a journal with a $3,000 publication fee. Each Columbia author may apply for reimbursement for $1,000. In the hypothetical case of an eligible journal with a $6,000 publication fee, each Columbia author could apply for reimbursement for a prorated portion of the $3,000 funding cap per article, or $1,000.

Application and Reimbursement Process

Funded Articles to Academic Commons

We deposit copies of the final published version of articles supported by the COAP Fund in Academic Commons, Columbia’s online research repository. Academic Commons staff will also contact funded authors and encourage them to deposit all their eligible research outputs into the repository.

Fund Cap

CUL/IS has committed $25,000 for the program for the 2014-15 academic year. Funding for articles that comply with the eligibility criteria will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. Note that as of March 2015 we are out of funds for this fiscal year. Please check back in July when the fund is replenished.

Regular Review

All aspects of this program, including the amount of funding committed to the program, will be analyzed and reviewed on a regular basis.